Critics have debated these questions: Did Lovelace rape Clarissa? Or was he impotent? Did his three female servants help Lovelace rape her?

William Warner, "Proposal and Habitation: The Temporality and Authority of Interpretation in and about a Scene of Richardson's Clarissa" boundary 2, Vol. 7, No. 2, Revisions of the Anglo-American Tradition: Part 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 169-200. 

William Warner, Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation. New Haven: Yale, 1979. 

Judith Wilt, "He Could Go No Farther: A Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa" PMLA Vol. 92, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 19-32.

Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's Clarissa. Cornell University Press, 1982

Ian Donaldson, The Rape of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.

Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (1982)

Frances Ferguson, "Rape and the Rise of the Novel," Representations 20 (1987) 88-112.

Ellen Moody, "'What right have you to detain me here?': Rape in Richardson's Clarissa"